Reverse Engineer Finds Kindle's Hidden Features

bensafrickingenius writes "CNET's Crave site has an interesting article on Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, and the extensive reverse-engineering that fans of the device have accomplished. The site specifically points out the work of Igor Skochinsky at the Reversing Everything website. His work on the Kindle's Root Shell has revealed some fascinating goodies: 'Among the ones uncovered and described on his blog are a basic photo viewer, a minesweeper game, and most interesting, location technology that uses the Kindle's CDMA networking to pinpoint its position. There also are some basic location-based services that call up a Google Maps view to show where you are and nearby gas stations and restaurants.'"

Re:Flagged.

[MBCook]

I'd be much more worried about buying the Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, The Anarchist's Cookbook, or Yertle the Turtle than Cather in the Rye.

Why bother with the Crave article at all?

[Abcd1234]

Honestly, why was it even included in the article posting? It's just a pointless summary of the content present in the original blog postings. 'course, I'm sure they appreciate the additional ad revenue...

Re:Why bother with the Crave article at all?

[Smidge204]

This is a problem with the "Blogosphere" in general. The vast majority (not all but certainly most) just echo news from other sources, or worse other blogs. They do not offer any insight, commentary or additional information on top of their source information. It's a crapshoot whether or not they actually write ANYTHING original rather than copy+paste.

The worst is when you have a blog linking to a blog linking to the original info. FFS people...

The net effect is old news gets constantly recycled and real news gets diluted. How many times have you seen a new blog post about something that actually happened months ago? The "9V battery contains AAAA cells" thing stands out as the most recent example for me: here [makezine.com] (2 Jan 2008), here [edn.com] (9 Jan 2007), here [blogspot.com] (3 Jan 2007), here [lifehacker.com] (23 Dec 2006). You have a "story" at LEAST a year old that has been copied verbatim at least four times!

Original here [axecollector.com] (No date) as far as I can tell, since all of the above blogs link to it.

Plus, all of these blogs have comment sections, which make them twice as redundant because the comments themselves also fail to add anything most of the time. If they do you'll never find them because there are so many other palces that run the same "story."

Fight the watering down of information! NEVER link to a blog unless it provides something EXTRA to the news! ALWAYS take a few minutes to get as close to the original source as possible! If you run a blog yourself, work to ADD to articles you link to - personal thoughts, additional information, insightful discussion on the topic at hand - be UNIQUE. That's how you get a readership... by having something worth reading.
=Smidge=

Re:eBook readers are all wrong

[orclevegam]

Except you've totally missed the point. Why bother with e-Ink in a fixed location like a server room? If you have access to a computer you don't need an e-ink display, and even more so if you have a regular power supply nearby. The beauty of e-Ink is that it's incredibly low power, high contrast, and portable. The drawback is that it's got a really slow refresh rate, so it's poor for interactive or animated content. None of that fits well with a smart phone or computer (well, maybe for reading e-mail on the smart phone, but who wants to carry a smart phone which is already chunky enough in addition to an e-Ink panel). The reason eReaders are useful is because they're more portable (relative to data density) than a normal book, have search capability (or at least they should by now), and don't require any of the bulk or infrastructure more traditional devices require.

Now, I'll agree a simple ePaper display would be cool, but ultimately it would only be useful after others built devices around it, which coincidentally happens to be exactly what's happening now. I mean, you can go and order eInk displays from OEMs if you know who to talk to, but they're really aren't particularly useful without some sort of data bus to back them. Know what happens when you make a bluetooth display without any other functionality? You end up with the palm folio. See what happened to that.

One justification for location sensing

[earlymon]

Personally, I wouldn't mind if there was a way to track lost or stolen items - especially if they contained any sort of account information whatsoever.

Re:Why bother with the Crave article at all?

[Smidge204]

If you want to duplicate and archive that's fine. But copy and pasting the same shit over and over with a new date is at best a lazy effort to get attention and at worst a dishonest excuse to keep the cobwebs off your otherwise worthless website. I would not criticize anyone for making a deliberate attempt to archive news, even trivial news. The "victories" of the Blogosphere are few and far between, and those victories are credited to that vanishingly small percentage of Blogs that actually do something relevant.

And that is still no excuse for not adding to it. You can copy an article verbatim and still improve it's value by making some addition to it, either as a personal comment, further research into the topic, or a retrospective analysis of the article itself.

The "Information Revolution" is more like an "Information Echo Box" - Plagarism is not revolutionary.
=Smidge=

Re:Flagged.

[Oktober Sunset]

Well, Yertle the Turtle is a book full of dangerous ideas, the turtle at the bottom over throws the entire system and topple the king leading to a non hierarchical state where all turtles live free, the final line is undoubtedly an incitement to revolution. It's exactly the sort of thing they don't want you to read.